Doing What I Love, and Loving What I Do

Well, today was definitely a work day during this break of mine. I hit the floor at 8am, ran hard all day, and just hit the... not the floor... five minutes ago.

Outdoor Cap, a company from here in Bentonville, approached me a few weeks ago about doing a little video post-production for them. They had shot some inner-office interviews of staff members, and wanted the material editing together for their annual meeting. The trick would be keeping the media portable, and multi-device friendly.

No problem. I got the handycam footage from them, and smiled at the thought of editing it in Final Cut Pro. FCP is my edit suite of choice, but it's spicy price tag places it at double the cost of the camera used to shoot this footage. I smiled.

The snag is that the final produced video files were over 3GB's in size. A size that would be unacceptable for the portability they demanded. Enter YouTube. I use YouTube as a tool, not as entertainment. I compressed the files, pumped them out to the web, and BOOM. 3GB of files turn into a 3KB email, containing links to the online videos. I smiled.

I spent the noon hour up at their office, touring the place and making sure the team was happy with my results. They wouldn't let me out the door without about 10 free hats, too. Most likely the best part of the entire production. Free hats.

Then I headed up to the church to do a little Media Intern labor. Chetley has taken the official reigns of that title, but I volunteered some time, anyway. It's Christmas Tree collapsing season, so they had some work cut out. It was fun to get to work with my old friends, Dave, Chad and Chetley. I'll volunteer my time anytime for the un-repayable kindness they have treated me with.

After that, Chetley and I grabbed some Burger King, and paired off to shoot the Bentonville High School basketball game tonight, just for a little fun. We both love shooting, and the best kind of shooting is when the pressure is off. This was about as low-pressure as it gets, with the produced images only contracting to Flickr and Facebook friendly's.

I did what I love, and I loved what I did. The only icing on the cake was that Aubrey and her mom came to the basketball game, so I got to spend time with them while Chetley had his turns behind the Canon real estate.